ROCKFORD — A husband-and-wife team marketing a solution to a pesky laundry problem took home the top prize Wednesday at the Stateline FastPitch Competition.

SockTabs won $5,000 at the contest, which spotlights entrepreneurs. Tracie and Glen Burress of Rockford pitched the product, which is similar in size to a cuff link and aims to keep socks together from the hamper to the washer to the dryer to combat the “Sock Monster.”

Tracie, a pharmaceutical sales representative, thought of the idea for the product nearly two years ago. Her husband is a pediatric gastroenterologist at Rockford Health System.

Around the same time, she suffered a brain aneurysm. She recovered, and the idea for SockTabs was still hanging around.

“It’s a common household issue, and I said there has got to be a better way to address this,” she said. “And it hit me that it has to be small enough where you can actually use it, but it still needs to be discreet. And it still needs to be an accessory, but it has to stay on the sock so when you are actually removing the socks, you can have them together. That way, they go into the hamper and the washing machine on the front end as opposed to trying to match them up on the back end.

“So when I figured that out, I said, ‘I got it’.”

This is the eighth year for FastPitch, where contestants pitch their product or business ideas in three minutes or less to a panel of judges. It had a new venue this year: the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Rockford, 1601 Parkview Ave.

Thirty-six pitchers took part in the preliminary round in the afternoon, and 12 finalists pitched in the evening round that was open to the public.

Casey Bankord took home the second-place prize for SlimBooks, a publishing company focused on more concise, readable books in print and digital formats. Third place went to Stacy McCaskill for fishwithme.net, a social media site for anglers.

Erin Hughes won the student award for Adjustable Servers, and Robert Haney won the CleanTech renewable-energy award for Soletronix.

Keynote speaker Joe Abraham, founder of BOSI Global, spoke about his research on entrepreneurs and the personality types that creators and innovators have. He encouraged pitchers and business owners to understand their “entrepreneurial DNA.”

Page 2 of 2 - “Your strategy comes from knowing who you are and who your team is,” he said. “Companies that are doing that are seeing game-changing results.”

A similar FastPitch competition takes place Aug. 20 in Racine and Kenosha counties in Wisconsin. Pitchers who didn’t win a cash prize in Rockford can pitch again.